Research Advisory Committee

Minutes — Meeting of August 14-15, 2003

Reported by Robert C. Bolander
Communications & Programs Manager
OCLC Office of Research

The OCLC Research Advisory Committee (RAC) met on Thursday and Friday, August 14-15, 2003 at the OCLC campus in Dublin, Ohio. Three RAC members were present:

• Paul Gherman, University Librarian, Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee); ex-officio OCLC Members Council Digital Libraries Research Interest Group.
• Neil McLean, Director, IMS Australia (Sydney)
• Barbara B. Tillett, Chief, Cataloging Policy & Support Office, The Library of Congress (Washington, DC)

Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC Research (OR), opened the meeting with a brief overview of activities since the previous meeting, changes in RAC membership, and the meeting agenda, which included presentations on five major OR activities:

• Web Services
  • Overview (Lorcan Dempsey)
  • Schema transformations (Jean Godby)
  • Terminology services (Diane Vizine-Goetz)
  • Vocabularies business (Eric Childress)
• Institutional Repositories
  • Overview (Thom Hickey)
  • DSpace and OCLC (Jenny Toves)
  • OAI projects (Jeff Young)
  • SRW/U (Ralph LeVan)
• Metadata Registries (Stu Weibel)
• FRBR (Thom Hickey, Ed O'Neill, Diane Vizine-Goetz, Deb Bendig)
• Comparative Collection Assessment (Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Ed O'Neill)

RAC member Barbara Tillett also provided an update on two Library of Congress (LC) activities:

• IFLA's FRBR recommendation
• VIAF, the Virtual International Authority File project involving LC, Die Deutsche Bibliothek (the German national library), and OCLC.

More information about most of these and other research projects is available on the OCLC Research Web site at http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/

Presenters generally fielded questions throughout their sessions, with a time for general discussion following each presentation. A period of open discussion across topics wrapped up the meeting's main session.

RAC members had lunch with research staff on Thursday, and met in executive session with OCLC president Jay Jordan, research VP Lorcan Dempsey and chief scientist Thom Hickey following the close of the open meeting on Friday.

Planning currently is underway to establish meeting dates for next year.